Damon's Cure
by Aisling Yinyr Ngaio
Summary: Love & Death: Bitten. The truth behind the creation of Damon's cure, was that it was never meant for him.


**_Damon's Cure_**  
_A Love & Death fanfic by Aisling Yinyr Ngaio_

* * *

In reality, that potion was never meant for him. It was for her.

She didn't want to remember her life from before anymore, before the vampire who turned her – accidentally, because her sister was his first target that horrible night and he only needed a little more blood from her. She didn't want to remember the lost from before, of a time when she still had family.

She might have been called a witch, but her knowledge wasn't actually due to her vampiric powers. It was because she wanted to feel the sun again, to walk among humans again without feeling as if she didn't belong. She wanted to be normal.

For decades she had roamed the land, despising herself as she killed, desperately searching for a cure that no other of her kind had attempted to find before. They were perfectly content with their new lives, and looked down on what they once were as mere cattle for them to feed on.

She finally gave up the search amongst her kind and instead started to dabble in herbology herself, spending hours eavesdropping on the roofs of medicine men, midwives, and healers, studying and drinking various concoctions, even seeking out those who profess themselves to be true students of witchcraft practicing in secret. While she learnt a great deal, every one of the "magic" cast, experimented, and brewed were failures.

The day her breakthrough came, she knew even before the fumes cleared that decades of hard work and misery were finally over. The potion called to the disease in her veins, both repulsing her vampire side, and yet rejoicing her human heart. She could hardly contain her excitement as she breathe in success and happiness after so long. Carefully she filled her flagon with the precious liquid and for the first time, felt freedom.

Felt freedom enough to be reckless in her plans for revival, a phoenix rising from the dead, to put on her best dress and to head into the closest town to celebrate, wanting to be reborn amongst humanity so that she might live again and erase her own ugliness from her mind.

And then she saw him.

It was perhaps fate for that day to be the annual harvest festival, for the palace to have one of their rare days where the palace courtyard was opened to the villagers from nearby, and a rarer day when the Prince himself graced the assembly… and charmed the ladies. Including, utterly unwittingly, herself as she stared from afar.

She had never felt such attraction to a male human in all her decades of life as a vampire. It was a miracle she managed to control herself enough that day to run back to her hut, for fear that she might hurt him, so great was her thirst for him.

Were she in greater control of her faculties she would never have left her prize alone and forgotten in subsequent days when she flew back to the castle and spied on the Prince. She longed for the chance and courage to speak to him, to be one of the ladies who constantly surrounded him, but he was never alone, and he seemed loved and happy, without her. She wanted him to be the center of her world just as he was hers. Couldn't he sense her love even from where she was hidden?

Eventually longing turned into jealousy, and jealousy into rage. It was the first time she deliberately set out to turn a human, and she felt no shame, no remorse at condemning him to a life that she had long hated. She only felt a sense of smug self-satisfaction as she watched her beloved destroy most of the palace servants on her command and close the gates permanently on the outside world, shutting out the remaining survivors of the carnage forever from their Prince.

He belonged to her now. And he would never get the potion that she had denied herself by consciously choosing this eternal curse over life. He would serve her, worship her and love her for all eternity. Life was wonderful, because by her fangs, she deserved to have what she wanted for once.

_- Finis -_


End file.
